Editorial: Five years after Hurricane Katrina, lessons from a work in progress

Tuesday

Aug 31, 2010 at 12:01 AMAug 31, 2010 at 1:04 AM

How to characterize New Orleans five years after Hurricane Katrina slammed the city and surrounding region?

How to characterize New Orleans five years after Hurricane Katrina slammed the city and surrounding region?

How far has it come since the storm overwhelmed the Big Easy's levees and flooded 80 percent of the metropolis? How is the Crescent City handling the double-whammy that arrived with the BP oil spill? What is the legacy of a disaster that killed more than 1,800 and poked a hole in the nation's sense of invulnerability?

Many of the press accounts from this past weekend's fifth anniversary commemoration agree that it's at best a mixed bag for what was once a city of close to a half-million souls, now reduced to 75 percent of that. Much depends on the neighborhood you're in. Many tourist-friendly areas bounced back quickly. Parts of the hard-hit Lower Ninth Ward stand today as testaments to impressive green technology used in the rebuilding. Nearby are places just a few steps above a war zone. All told, there are still 55,000 abandoned residences, nearly a quarter of the city's housing stock. Many are uninhabitable. The shameful displays of looting in early September 2005 may be gone, but the city still sported the highest murder rate in the country last year with 174 slayings, reports the Wall Street Journal.

And yet New Orleans' job-loss and business start-up statistics are better than both the national average and those of comparable cities. Poverty is down and wages are up. (Before thinking this alone marks a renaissance for New Orleans, bear in mind that the data is skewed by the fact many of the poorest residents simply couldn't afford to return.) New Orleans' public school system, which pre-Katrina was something of an embarrassment, has experienced early success with charter schools, thanks in part to pioneers like Paul Vallas, onetime head of the Chicago Public Schools. The number of local schools meeting state standards has more than doubled. Meanwhile, Louisiana officials have used recovery efforts, the whole idea of starting from scratch, as an excuse to tackle public corruption, as well. More power to them.

Visiting the city this past weekend, President Barack Obama pledged the mistakes of Katrina wouldn't be repeated. "Ultimately, that must be the legacy of Katrina," Obama said. "Not one of neglect, but of action. Not one of indifference, but of empathy. Not of abandonment, but of a community working together to meet shared challenges."

What occurred in 2005 after the storm hit was indeed "a manmade catastrophe - a shameful breakdown in government that left countless men, women and children abandoned and alone." As goofs by government go, history will record that there were some doozies post-Katrina. If Obama is saying we're past that, we'd say there's still a ways to go before concluding that anyone's doing a "heckuva job."

An assessment in the Washington Post by Stephen Flynn, director of the nonpartisan Center for National Policy, indicated that many of the same problems persist. "The responsibility for helping communities recover from major disasters remains sprawled across the federal bureaucracy. ... During the oil spill, local residents say, they had to deal with a dizzying array of federal officials who often seemed to lack the authority to make decisions. They described having flashbacks to their experiences after Hurricane Katrina." Indeed, federal officials are spending as much time covering their bureaucratic posteriors - compiling statistics on the good work they're doing to feed to their home offices back in Washington - as they are actually helping in the recovery, reported Flynn.

Not just New Orleans but the nation suffered a blow with Katrina. Certainly it was a turning point for the Bush administration in how Americans perceived its competence. The storm sowed a self-doubt in citizens who had long believed America up to any conceivable challenge. That can-do attitude remains in the healing process, too.

In short, the nation needs a win. New Orleans clearly does, and we don't just mean a Super Bowl. As such we ought to be paying attention to what's working down there - better schools, business start-ups, etc. - and seeing what can come out of that Louisiana laboratory for application elsewhere in America. May that be the legacy of Katrina: She may have staggered one of the world's most unique cities, but ultimately it and the country bounced back, better, stronger and wiser than ever.

Journal Star of Peoria, Ill.

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